BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX review -
The GeForce GTX 285 GPU

The GeForce GTX 285 GPU

So the GTX 285 is all about the 55nm fabrication based product series GTX 200. The GTX series 200 GPUs amounts up to 1400 million transistors. It's the biggest goblin of a graphics processor that NVIDIA has ever built with 1400 million transistors. 1400 million transistors, if you think about that for a minute you might go nuts. Keep in mind that one of the best GPUs ever made, the GeForce 8800 'only' had around 700 Million transistors. It makes much sense for NVIDIA to get that die size down as they were still stuck on an architecture based on 65nm as fabricated by TSMC.

GeForce GTX 285

1.4 billion transistors

993 GigaFLOP processing power

240 processing (shader) cores (GTX 280)

55nm node fabrication

DirectX 10

New power management enhancements

CUDA parallel processing

GeForce PhysX

How different is the GTX 280 to the GTX 285? A very valid question, the answer is: for you as an end user, not much. Aside from some small clock frequency changes and a minor performance increase it is 99% the same product. The GeForce GTX 285 still has 240 stream processors.

The new GeForce GTX 285 will run at a core clock frequency of 648 MHz. There are more clocked domains inside that GPU though, the shader processor run at 1496 MHz and the memory is at 1242 MHz (effective 2484 MHz). And though that is a higher clock opposed to the previous GTX 280, it accounts for only a little extra performance.

GeForce9800 GTX

GeForce GTX260

GeForce GTX280

GeForce GTX285

GeForce GTX295

Stream (Shader) Processors

128

192

240

240

240 x2

Core Clock (MHz)

675

576

602

648

576

Shader Clock (MHz)

1675

1242

1296

1476

1242

Memory Clock (MHz) x2

1100

999

1053

1242

999

Memory amount

512 MB

896 MB

1024 MB

1024 MB

1792 MB

Memory Interface

256-bit

448-bit

512-bit

512-bit

448-bit x2

HDCP

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Two Dual link DVI

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

For the folks that like to go a little deeper: this high-end part has 1GB of GDDR3 memory which has a 512-bit memory bus that binds to 8 memory controllers inside the GPU. At the end of the pipeline we run into an improved ROP (Raster Operation) engine, and the 280 has 32 of them and 80 texture filtering units. Performance accounts up to roughly 1 TFLOP (depending how you measure it actually), so the new clocks bring NVIDIA to the missed Teraflop from the GTX 280 launch...

What's great about its release is that a move towards a smaller die and fabrication process (55nm) often brings several advantages. The new GTX 285 part requires a little less voltage, as a result it consumes less power. And a result of that is that this card no longer needs both the 6-pin and 8-pin power connectors to get enough juice. You'll spot two 6-pin connectors on the boards.

The TDP (peak wattage) is now roughly 183 Watts (GTX 280 = 235W), which in all honesty is extremely good. See, the product got faster, yet consumes less power. That's a win in my book.

Cast your mind back to the GeForce 8800 Ultra which isn't that far off from that 235W peak either. The GTX 285 is much faster. So the performance per Watt again has increased on many fronts.

So again, the power for the GTX 285 is fed by two six-pin connectors. Power consumption for this 10.5-inch board is 183W.

BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2OC LE review testBFG have worked their magic again and teamed up with the guys and gals from CoolLIT systems, a company designing sometimes awkward yet always interesting cooling products. As such BFG released two products based on CoolIT's cooling; here at Guru3D we will test and review the BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2OC (limited edition), that's a self-contained easy to install liquid cooling solution preinstalled onto the GeForce GTX 295 filled with coolant and everything; this kit has a 120mm fan, radiator, pump, graphics card cooling block, tubing and reservoir all ready to be inserted into the PC for some tender love and care in your gaming experience.

BFG GeForce GTX 295 H20 review (water cooling)BFG is the first to bring a liquid-cooled GeForce GTX 295 to the market. As extravagant liquid cooling a GeForce GTX 295 really is, the end results in cooling performance, gaming performance and the incredible aesthetics a product like this offers is extraordinary. So in this article we'll chat a little about the GTX 295 technology, then have a look at BFG's bundle, a really extensive photo-shoot, look at performance with the hottest games available, overclock it until it nearly dies... and then sum it all up in our verdict.

BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX reviewWe'll look at BFG finest GeForce GTX 285 offering. See, just like many of NVIDIA's board partners BFG offers the product in several flavors. The offer their regular OC edition, yet also OC+, OC2 and OCX editions. They've got quite a range. We'll explain the difference over the next few pages. Let us have a peek of what's under the hood of the BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX.

BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX reviewOCX is short for 'Overclocking eXtreme' and it literally boils down to the fact that this is BFG's most high-end specced product in whatever the product range might be. Today we take the fastest NVIDIA graphics card available on the planet. The GeForce GTX 280. A 1400 million transistor counting piece of merchandise that raises the bar of single-GPU graphics processing.